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Red Hat CEO: PaaS is the new application server

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In an interview with InfoWorld, CEO Jim Whitehurst discusses Red Hat's ambitions with the cloud and OpenShift

Red Hat is best known for its RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) distribution, but the company has been making a big push into cloud computing with its OpenShift platform as a service, offered in both public and private cloud versions. Initially launched three years ago, OpenShift is based on RHEL and offers autoscaling while letting developers focus on code and automating IT service delivery. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst about the company's cloud efforts.

InfoWorld: Are enterprises really making a concerted effort to move applications to PaaS, or are they still keeping that in-house?

Whitehurst: People are much more interested in running PaaS in-house than not in-house. We see a lot of interest in PaaS but very little interest necessarily in running PaaS on cloud infrastructures. I think broadly, this is going to be much more of the era of private cloud infrastructure as a service, more so than PaaS. PaaS is still in its early days, much earlier days than IaaS.

InfoWorld: How critical is OpenShift and cloud computing to Red Hat? Do you see this as a bigger revenue-generating opportunity than selling support services for your Red Hat Linux variant?

Whitehurst: It goes a little bit together. Without a doubt, whether it's our storage or our version of OpenStack or OpenShift, [they are] all new revenue opportunities for us, and they all tie back to RHEL to help drive RHEL sales.